‘Thanks!’
‘How long have I known you?’ Wolfe asked.
‘Too bloody long.’
‘Long enough to know that it’s got to be something serious for you to be off your drink.’
Brady shrugged.
‘Like I said, first day back and all.’
‘The job’s never gotten to you before, laddie.’
Brady casually shrugged.
‘I should have known. Claudia, eh? You should have told me to keep my bloody mouth shut,’ Wolfe stated.
‘Well, seeing as you feel so bad about it you can take these off my hands then,’ Brady said, suddenly remembering the concert tickets he’d stuffed in his coat pocket months ago. They had arrived a few days before he had been shot and he had grabbed the envelope off the hall floor, not wanting Claudia to see them. He had shoved them in his jacket and had forgotten about them until today.
He pulled out an envelope from the inside of his jacket.
He pushed it towards Wolfe.
‘What’s this?’ Wolfe asked as he looked at the two tickets inside.
‘I booked these for Claudia and I before …’ Brady faltered, shrugging. ‘Well, I’ve got no use for them now.’
‘How did you get hold of these? I heard they’d sold out within a few days?’
‘I have my contacts.’
‘I can’t,’ answered Wolfe, as he ran a hand over his smooth, bald head. ‘It wouldn’t feel right. Why don’t you give them to Claudia instead?’
Brady shook his head.
‘She’s in London and from what I’ve heard she’s got no intention of coming back.’
Wolfe still looked unconvinced.
‘Seriously, you’d be doing me a favour. Take a date with you,’ Brady suggested.
John Tavener was one of the few contemporary British composers that Brady really liked. In particular, ‘The Protecting Veil’ was an evocative and haunting piece that had remained with Brady from the first moment he had heard it, more than a decade earlier. But, despite his appreciation of the piece, the last place he wanted to be was at The Sage in Gateshead, sat on his own, listening to music that would painfully remind him of everything that was wrong with his life. He could do that at home, sat in the dark holding on to a bottle of Scotch.
‘When the hell have you ever known me have a date, laddie?’ snorted Wolfe as he resignedly accepted the tickets.
For once Wolfe had him. Brady couldn’t answer because he couldn’t remember either. It was fair to say Wolfe was married first to his job and then to drink. Ormaybe it was the other way round? Brady wasn’t that sure any more.
Regardless of his relationship with alcohol, Wolfe was always impeccably dressed. He wore tailored suits, silk shirts and matching ties. And he always sported a silk handkerchief in his suit pocket. But his jowly face was starting to show the telltale signs of his affair with booze.
‘Right!’ blustered Wolfe, eager to leave his personal life behind. He ran his hand over his gleaming head before getting down to business.
‘I’ll obviously email you the report once it’s been put together. But I thought you might be interested in some of the things I uncovered during the post-mortem.’
Brady bent forward, keen to hear what Wolfe had found out.
‘Time of death was approximately between 12.30 am and 2.00 am.’
‘Can you be more precise?’
‘I thought I was being. I’m not the bloody detective here. All I’ve got to go on is the victim’s body temperature, rigor and liver mortis and stomach contents. But if you can do better, laddie, then by all means!’
Brady kicked himself. He knew better than to tell Wolfe how to do his job.
‘Can I continue?’
Brady nodded apologetically.
‘There was no evidence of finger-shaped bruising or nail marks on or around the neck, but there were signs of swelling. Petechial haemorrhaging was present above and below a red ligature mark, and when I opened her up the hyoid bone had been fractured. All typically in keeping with ligature strangulation. Manner of death was without adoubt, homicide,’ Wolfe concluded. ‘However there were self-inflicted scratches at the front of the neck. They matched the skin tissue found under the victim’s nails. Presumably the poor girl must have struggled to loosen the scarf from her neck while she was being choked.’
Brady had expected this. The scarf around Sophie’s neck had turned out to be more than just a fashion statement. Someone had used it to strangle her to death.
‘The skull was fractured and bone matter was present in the brain, but there was no bleeding between the skull and dura. Which means, as I’m sure you know, she was already dead before any trauma occurred to her face and head.’
Brady edged forward in his seat for what was coming next.
‘The examination of her pelvic area indicated that the victim had not given birth and was not pregnant at the time of death. But,’ Wolfe paused to get his breath, ‘I found evidence of recent sexual activity but no indication that the sexual contact was forced. As you’d expect, I’ve had vaginal and anal fluid samples removed for analysis.’
‘There’s definitely no evidence that she might have been raped?’
‘That’s what I said. There was no indication of sexual aggression,’ Wolfe repeated.
Brady nodded.
‘How recent was the sexual intercourse?’
‘Within the hour before she was killed,’ answered Wolfe. ‘But that’s not all, there was also a significant amount of internal and external vaginal and perineum tissue scarring roughly dating back four years.’
‘Suggestive of sexual abuse?’
‘With that sort of severe trauma, I would say it was more than likely,’ answered Wolfe.
Brady nodded, not surprised. He had had a gut feeling that there was a lot more to the victim’s life than her parents would have him believe.
‘Anything else?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’ asked Wolfe, raising his eyebrow at Brady. ‘We’ll have a clearer idea of whether she was high on drugs or alcohol once the lab comes back with the samples I’ve submitted.’
‘Sure,’ Brady replied.
‘They grow up damned fast nowadays, laddie,’ Wolfe added as he picked up his glass.
Brady didn’t disagree. Given what he already knew, it would come as no surprise if the toxicological reports found traces of drugs and alcohol in her blood and urine. But the fact was, she was just a kid; a kid who was having sex. Add to that forced sex from as young as eleven.
Paul Simmons immediately came to mind.
Statistically, step-fathers were not only more likely to kill a step-child than the biological father, but also four times more likely to sexually abuse a step-child. Brady couldn’t shake the bad feeling he had about Simmons. It had been there from the moment he had met him. That coupled with the fact that Simmons had walked into Sophie’s life over four years ago, around the same time that Wolfe suggested the sexual abuse had started.
But there were also the photographs of the victim that Brady needed to consider. Photographs which uncannily echoed Wolfe’s sentiments that in today’s society, kids grew up fast. Too damned fast.
‘She was just fifteen,’ Brady stated as he looked at Wolfe.
‘Well, the evidence is there whether you like it or not,’ Wolfe said as his sharp eyes scrutinised Brady. ‘The question is what are you going to do with it, laddie?’
Brady picked up the evening edition of
Someone had thoughtfully left it on his desk; along with an in-tray of emails he needed to answer and a pile
